hardwaregeek

Almost finished with A Perfect Spy. Maybe the most emotionally compelling Le Carre I’ve read. Long and I do find him a bit of a slog (The Honorable Schoolboy especially), but there’s something so fun about his brand of tactical, psychological espionage.

Perhaps there’s a difference between what people prefer looking at and what’s actually nicer to inhabit? Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. It’s like if you asked someone to judge a phone based on a photo. Yes there’s some aesthetic judgement but it matters more if the phone is usable.

I know that personally I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower. But I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.

It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.

That seems like a perfectly good use of time for a kid in the 70’s! You’d learn a lot of engineering skills and demonstrate a tenaciousness that most people don’t have. I don’t think the goal is to predict what will be the important technology in 10 years. The goal is to challenge oneself with hard tasks and learn interesting stuff. A lot of the “AI” people today were compilers people yesterday

I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.

Ok but isn’t that true of all software development? It’s not like anybody’s done a rigorous test of writing their entire codebase in Python vs Java. It’s all vibes based there. People create post-hoc justifications for why they use certain technologies but the reality is a lot more vibes than anything else.

When you start getting hate, you’ve made it. Up until then you’re a hypothetical that people like. Maybe they’ve built a side project with you or read the docs. You only get hate when people have used your tool and butted up against limitations. We saw this with Deno too where they went from beloved potential savior to realistic, limited tool. Hate is good. It means people rely on you

Both can be true? You can be doing really well and still have long term risk. Dethroning incumbents takes longer than people think and it’s possible that search growth goes 20%, 10%, -10%, -50%

A fun counter factual: try “proving” that famous scientists are their collaborators based on this methodology. Obviously Hardy and Littlewood are the same person. They’re both British mathematicians who use analysis and number theory and have similar sensibilities in politics and math.

I’ve proposed that someone open a restaurant of invasive species. You could make some decent dishes with lionfish, blackberries, golden oyster mushrooms, venison, etc

Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.

I'm not fully convinced that there's a tenable model for open source devtool companies. Usually there's some handwavy plan to do hosting or code quality that never comes to fruition. Hosting is a hard business and the 800 pound gorilla in the room of AWS is even harder to surmount. Otherwise, I'm not sure what business model you can look towards. Support maybe?

I wonder if it's almost like a new version of management consulting. You hire/invest in a bunch of smart 20-somethings who seem generally intelligent with the idea that they'll "disrupt" an industry with their from-first principles approach. Do the 23 year old McKinsey consultants particularly care about their work? No, but the McKinsey name is a fast way to gain clout and access to executives. Ditto the YC name